Right, recently there have been 3 major annoucements from the big three players in the console game, this being, Sony (of playstation fame), Nintendo (SNES/N64) and Microsoft (xbox). Both Sony and Nintendo launched, or rather showed more details of, their consoles at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) and Microsoft just contiued to show off its Xbox360 that it launched days beforehand on a special MTV show (see the video gallery).
So anyway, what do we know? well, not as much as we think probably, because the pure numbers being flung around like tomatoes at some weird spanish tomatoe festival are not the be all and end all as far as games are concerned. That said, lets see what has been said by all parties so far:
Nintendo
Nintendo’s new console is called the ‘Revolution’, it uses a similar kind of set up as the 360 at first glance, its main processor is a custom PowerPC chip from IBM and its graphics chip is from ATi, this however, is not really the full story, the very fact that Nintendo are not banging on about how powerful the console is, is basically because, it isnt as powerful as the other contenders, no doubt it will still dominate your game cube, by a factor of 3-4 infact, nothing like the kind of claims the other two are claiming.
As you can see from the picture, its quite a diddy unit, I wonder if it is a little too conservative to fly nowadays, especially as it would appear that rather than competing with Sony and MS, Nintendo is trying to get into different markets with its new baby. Anyway, Nintendo are aiming to make the device cheap and profitable, something that the other two will struggle to achieve.
Sony PlayStation3
In typical Sony style, they have come out of the blocks shouting about how much better their effort is going to be compared to everyone else’s, this is nothing new, remember when Sega made consoles? they released the Dreamcast ages before the PS2 but ultimately Sony talk made people wait, and Sega ultimately went down the toilet, looking back now however, many question weather the Dreamcast was actually that much worse than the PS2, Sony definately didnt deliver on the claims that it made in an effort to beat down Sega. Regardless, lets have a look at what they have to say for their new machine.
Predictably, they have already attacked the power of the 360 (because neither view Revolution as a direct threat?), claiming 2.18 Teraflops per second, thats twice what 360 is offering. Will this make any difference to us as consumers, probably less than you may imagine.
Unlike the Nintendo, Sony actually let fly with some real figures for their new system, which are:
- It will support Blu-ray, DVD±R/W, CD-R/RW
- Backwards compatible with the PlayStation 2 and original Playstation
- One 3.2GHz Cell processor—total system performance rated at 2.18 teraflops ;it will have 256MB system RAM 3.2GHz, and 256MB GDDR VRAM at 700MHz
- The nVidia graphics will be called the RSX (”Reality Synthesizer”), and will trump the Xbox 360 with 1080p (360 is 1080i) graphics support.
- There will be a 2.5-inch hard drive attachment—a first for a Sony launch
- Memory Stick Duo slot, and very surprisingly, an SD and CF slots
- Bluetooth support with up to seven wireless controllers
- Six USB system ports
All very impressive, but will it be that it is a difficult machine for game developers to get to grips with as the PS2 was? it could prove that factors such as that are more important that power in the next wave of consoles, with the ever spiraling cost of developing games and the current trend for games dev’s to go pop.
I think that the PS3’s success will depend on how well MS does with the 360 prior to its launch, and what it can deliver that is noticably better than the 360. On a seperate note, what was the guy thinking who designed the controller, it just looks like a melted lump, but the proof will be in the playing.
Microsoft Xbox 360
Probably the machine that we know the most about, this is due to its public display on TV and the fact that it is the machine closest to release, and thus more of its spec is set in stone. First to its revelation to the world, Microsoft didnt follow the usual route of unveiling its new console to the journalists and industry bods at E3 or any other big trade show, instead, it teamed up with MTV to show the world (or at least the viewers of MTV) the Xbox 360 first, this was quite a bold move, but one that pleased gamers, as they got to see what all the fuss was about at the same time as everyone else. Anyway, clever release shows aside, due to a bunch of leaks on the internet days before the official demonstration, alot was already known about the 360 when the show went on air, what it looked like and most of the spec had been under discussion and mainly correct for along time, this was probably a little bit down to MS and a little bit down to guesses made when compared to PC hardware. Regardless the machine differs asthetically about as much as it could from the original Xbox, that came under heavy critisism for its bulky and bland apperance, the 360 is a white sleek design, that is also smaller than the original.
But what of the actual specifications of the 360, well here is what we have so far:
- Support for DVD-video, DVD-Rom, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 cd, JPEG photo CD
- All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
- Customizable face plates to change appearance
- 3 USB 2.0 ports
- Support for 4 wireless controllers
- Detachable 20GB drive
- Wi-Fi ready
- Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
- 2 hardware threads per core
- 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
- 1 MB L2 cache - CPU Game Math Performance
- 9 billion dots per second - Custom ATI Graphics Processor
- 500 MNz
- 10 MB embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture - Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
- 700 MNz DDR - Memory Bandwidth
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s frontside bus - Audio
- Mulitchannel surround sond output
- Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 bit processing
- 256+ audio channels
Now this info probably means about as much to you as it does to me, and probably matters less, the real question is, how good are the games going to be? Well MS, having fallen victim to the ‘there is no good games on Xbox’ calls from PS2 users in the past has made its best attempt at signing up all the good games developers it can, it has some scoops in there along the way, the next Final Fantasy game will be appearing on the 360. One issue that has been rather skated around tho is backwards compatability, the systems ability to play the old games from the original Xbox, well the latest news on the grape vine is that it will be with most major titles, what this actually means is a mystery to me, as i assume what constitutes a major title to a games player is a rather personal opinion, none the less, will this be a stumbling block for MS? only time will tell.
On a side note, check this out:
Its the Gameboy mini, its only 4×2x0.7 inches in size and can play gameboy advanced games, kind of cool, i think you’ll agree.
with info from:
Xbox-scene
Engadget